


This Shirt Is a Monet

by BlueHurricane



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: M/M, Not Epilogue Compliant, One Shot, Poetry, Poetry reading, baring one's soul, the peach scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-20 03:36:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14252193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueHurricane/pseuds/BlueHurricane
Summary: Elio hopes exposing his secrets to a crowd will bring him catharsis.  Maybe wearing Billowy will make him brave enough to go through with it.





	This Shirt Is a Monet

**Author's Note:**

> Disregards the fifteen-years-later sort-of-epilogue.  
> All rights to Mr. Aciman. Thank you for your prose and your characters; they are beautiful, Sir.

I had looked forward to the day with a strange sort of apprehension. It reminded me vaguely of the weeks I’d spent waiting for word from one of the universities I’d applied to, trying to guess and gauge what the outcome might be. Would my dreams come true, would my hopes be in vain, would the result be mediocre at best?

It was the day before my birthday and I willed myself to believe it would be mediocre. I wasn’t waiting for anything in particular; my fears and desires alike were obscure at best, as they always had been when it came to Him.

There had been others after him. Girls. Boys. More peaches, even.  (Though those attempts had merely been a way of me feverishly reliving a moment that I could never seem to recapture or recreate or even remember clearly as a factual event. If I ever saw him again, I’d always told myself I’d ask, “Was that real? Was it as sacred as I recall? Was it as intimate? Or was it all just a fever dream in my mind, as bullshit yet beautiful as that recurring dream I once had of you begging me not to stop, to never stop lest I kill you? Was this yet another murderous plea? Not ‘Kill me if I stop!’ as I recklessly cycle down a hill in Italy in a place lost in the channels of my mind and the corridors of our hidden cosmos, but ‘Eat the essence of my life and the thought of it will kill me, every day, for the rest of Time.’”)

There had been others after him. But there had never been another like him.  
And when my twenty-fourth birthday lazily made its way around the corner, I found myself startled. It hadn’t occurred to me. In all those years, it had never occurred to me that one day I would be the same age he’d been when we had met.

I stood on the balcony and stared out over the city. I’d somehow found my way to graduate school in Los Angeles and shared an apartment with too many roommates. I wondered the night it hit me—the night I realized I was only a month from that arbitrary marker of age, these 365-days-times-twenty-four-years I’d spent on a tiny planet in this vast universe—if I’d meet my own Elio. I wondered if out there in the city, with all those lights laid out like a second set of constellations even as their light blurred out the vision of the stars above them, there was a boy of merely seventeen, the youngest of his family and the most sensitive, who was bound to succumb to a special kind of madness with me.

The thought disgusted me. I didn’t want an Elio; I wanted the man I _called_ Elio. I wanted the man I called by my name.

When the day finally arrived, it was with no small amount of liquor. I’d been to a poetry reading the night before for a fellow fine arts student. My own reading was scheduled for that very day—a sort of trick I’d unwittingly played on myself. I’d known I wanted to read these poems for some time and I’d thought my birthday would make the perfect debut. Perhaps subconsciously I’d made the connection that this birthday was different and that these poems would be that much more apropos for it.

I took a deep swig of wine. It was seven at night and I’d been carefully managing my alcohol all day, never allowing myself to get quite drunk but always near the precipice. I couldn’t imagine baring myself so completely if it weren’t in the name of art and with the help of liquid courage.

“Elio!” The voice belonged to one of my roommates, Phillip, standing in the doorway with his face impassive by design. He wanted me to think he didn’t care much about this; he thought if he was nonchalant about it, it would ease my anxiety. It didn’t.

I hummed and took another sip, a sort of non-response response. He didn’t reply, rested his hand on the doorjamb, and licked his lips. If he wanted me to think he wasn’t nervous for me, he’d have to learn to master his tells.

“Are you going to wear it?” he finally asked.

“No,” I replied hastily. I brought the glass to my lips, paused. “Yes,” I changed my mind, my voice whispering into the glass and echoing back out at me like a taunt. Of course I’d wear it. I could hear His voice in my head, saying, _If not later, when?_ and it made me so livid with the residual shame it brought back that I couldn’t help but agree that I had to wear it. Tonight, I’d be brave.

I set the wine glass down and took the blue billowing shirt from the hanger on the door. It fluttered into my hands, no less buoyant than it was when I first saw it on Him seven years ago.

“Ready?” Phillip asked.

“Yes.” _No_.

* * *

 

The crowd was larger than I’d anticipated with surprisingly new faces. I’d thought some of those who had attended Silvia’s reading the night before would be here, as well, but only a few faces stood out as familiar. There were some people in the back milling about, pouring themselves something to drink. I considered going over and downing some more myself, but I knew better. _I know myself,_ I heard Him say in my head. I remembered a time when I wished I could say that as confidently as He did. Perhaps I’d finally reached that age. Or perhaps I was just as clueless about my own self as I’d been at seventeen. All I knew at that moment was that I couldn’t drink another drop and stay relatively sober. And I wanted to remember tonight, no matter how it ended—with applause or pity.

Phillip gave me an introduction but I wasn’t paying much attention, my own poems gripped in my hand tightly. My stomach twisted the way it does when you’re in chaotic water. I thought of the beach in Italy where I made love to Mariza. The water there made my stomach feel like a buoy in my body.

I came back to myself to see dozens of eyes, some glazed over with alcohol and probably something stronger, expectantly waiting for me to speak. I closed my eyes and for a moment, I imagined I could smell apricot trees and the ocean and Him.

“This shirt—“ I paused abruptly, my free hand reaching down to feel the fabric hanging loosely on my torso, “—this shirt has no detail. In the wind, it billows like a formless cloud and in the night it hangs on the door of my closet like a ghost that I wish would take shape. This shirt is as elusive as an impressionistic painting. If I look at it straight on, I see only blue, fabric, buttons, nothing. It is an article of clothing and nothing else. But in the periphery, it becomes _Him._ It burns the corner of my eye and taunts me, begs me, to look. And if I just let it stay there, where I can see it but can’t quite see at all, it stands over my bed and whispers to me, it threads phantom fingers through my hair and touches my lips like a prayer. It tugs at the Star of David at my neck and it glides across my naked skin in the night. It seeps into my dreams and into my skin and all over me. When I see it through the corner of my eye, it isn’t a shirt at all and my room is not my room now and my body is not my body. It is Him, I am in my room—His room—and I am His. This shirt has no detail. It is a Monet. And the tragedy I face every morning is forcing myself to give it my full attention only to find that today as every other day before, it’s only a shirt hanging on my closet door and never hanging off Him.”

Like a mockery of my poetry, I saw a flash of something in my peripheral vision. I didn’t turn to glance. Instead, I continued to read. I ignored the growing chaos in my gut screaming at me and I poured out my aged and fermented agony. I spoke of Escher’s staircase and our intertwined souls, the peach and the life in my and the life in Him and the life I never got to live with Him. I spoke of past lovers and people I’d used, how I sought for Him in every naked creature strewn out on and under and twisted in my bedsheets. I said too much. I said everything I’d never said before he left me in Rome.

My final words were: “Elio, I love you.”  
It didn’t matter that no one understood that final line. They believed it was me wishing he’d have said them to me, not that those were the words I fantasized delivering to him. I wouldn’t explain. It only mattered that I’d finally given life to those words.

I finally raised my eyes to the crowd as applause shook the room. But the sounds dimmed in my ears immediately as my eyes caught the intense gaze of a man standing in the center of the room, directly before me.

On his neck he wore a gold Star of David.

Air wouldn’t reach my lungs. I’d made a terrible mistake and I could feel it cementing itself between us. He wouldn’t forgive me for this, not for this. Panic seized me and if I wasn’t enraptured by his very presence, wasn’t as equally elated as mortified, then I might have removed my gaze to find a hasty exit.

But then he smiled and I couldn’t understand why. It was a secret smile, almost a smirk but with absolutely no malice.

My eyes followed his as they drifted down to his hands. His left ring finger, displayed openly for me to see, was bare.

And in his right hand…Oliver held _a_ _peach._


End file.
